i need help with designing my first website

C

Craig Mercer

New member
i am broke and cant afford to pay anybody to do it i am trying to do it for free anybody have any ideas. please be free to share or help me with designing it:)
 
Craig, I'd be willing to help. I designed my website (www.superwashing.com) so if you like it then shoot me a PM and I'll try to help you. If you don't like it, then just find a site you do like and try to replicate it. Either way, I wish you success in your endeavor.
 
Nice lettering on your truck, does it get you a lot of calls?
 
Take a look at ours. My wife does all of our design...afer you get it up we could give you some ideas if you like ours.
 
Sparklean said:
Craig, I'd be willing to help. I designed my website (www.superwashing.com) so if you like it then shoot me a PM and I'll try to help you. If you don't like it, then just find a site you do like and try to replicate it. Either way, I wish you success in your endeavor.
Click to expand...

Adam, Just trying to help, your site took some time to load up on my computer. Most people are impatient and will not wait for pages to load up. I would suggest to make your graphics a little less memory hungry. Nice photos though.

Regards, Kemp
 
doesn't anyone use yahoo or godaddy or some other website builder?
 
Craig...I hate to be a fuddy duddy, but if you're broke, the last thing you need to worry about right now is a website in my opinion. With that said, for hosting use Host Gator. If you don't have your domain name registered yet, use Name Cheap They have a thing called cpanel and fantastico to help you build your site. It's really good stuff. Forget all the fancy graphics and go for a lead generation type page. Google that, it will keep you busy for awhile.

Another option is yellowpages.com...I think you get a free website with an online advertisement. Check it out.

But, if I were you, I'd send out some letters or make up some flyers on your computer and send them out to get some business first.
 
podius said:
doesn't anyone use yahoo or godaddy or some other website builder?
Click to expand...

We use godaddy, but the full service site builders were expensive and we didnt like their designs. So we just use them for hosting, and design ourselves. If everyone could take a look and let me know what you think or give some pointers, that would be great.
 
Christopher: Not many, but I expect that to pick up once I get my other truck lettered and when spring is here.

Christopher said:
Nice lettering on your truck, does it get you a lot of calls?
Click to expand...


Kemp, thanks. My site probably does take a while to load (especially during peak times) as there are other sites hosted on that machine and it's only a Static IP cable connection w/ 768kb up so it's not super fast. However, even when I download the pictures from home it only takes half a minute (or less) for the gallery to load so perhaps your ISP to my ISP was just experiencing unusually high latency when you viewed it. Can you check my page again and see if it loads slowly again?

Kemp said:
Adam, Just trying to help, your site took some time to load up on my computer. Most people are impatient and will not wait for pages to load up. I would suggest to make your graphics a little less memory hungry. Nice photos though.

Regards, Kemp
Click to expand...
 
Scott D. said:
If everyone could take a look and let me know what you think or give some pointers, that would be great.
Click to expand...

From the perspective of someone who does not offer roof cleaning, I think your site looks nice. It's easy to navigate, loads quickly, and very informative.
 
I think it looks fine. It does its job and that's to let people know what you do, show examples of work done and give them information on contacting you. Only suggestion I have is to properly resize your pictures. Take http://www.gotadirtyroof.com/images/before_pgkp.jpg for example, your HTML forces its size to 309 x 212, but the image's actual size is 617 x 424. You should just resize the image to be 309x212 as that would save on load time.

Now, the above example was just to properly size the image to save on load time as 309 x 212 is only 1 pixel off from being 1/4 of 617 x 424 so the image is scaled very well by the browser.

http://www.gotadirtyroof.com/images/company_photo.jpg is not scaled well at all! In fact, it looks horrible. The image is 615 x 450, but your HTML forces the browser to render it at 383 x 260 which is not close to 1/2 or 1/4 so the image is scaled very poorly. Just resize it to 383 x 450 in photoshop or another image editor and you'll be good to go.

Your page does have a side scroller at the bottom which is odd, but that has to do with how your DIV elements are setup.

Scott D. said:
We use godaddy, but the full service site builders were expensive and we didnt like their designs. So we just use them for hosting, and design ourselves. If everyone could take a look and let me know what you think or give some pointers, that would be great.
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top